Mom was speeding back home. It was 1991 and the season premier of Northern Exposure was on at 8pm. We had to hustle, I'd been at a friend's house and if we didn't make it home in time, she'd miss it. So we sped down the streets of Atlanta, inches away from certain death so that we could see if Dr. Fleishman and Maggie would finally get together. She had an appointment with them, and it could not be missed.

Appointment-based media is now all but extinct. We can time-shift television now and watch Northern Exposure whenever we want to. Instead of reading the morning paper before we go to work now, the paper follows us around all day long, in our pockets — waiting to be read at the dinner table or anywhere else we feel the urge to look at a glowing blue rectangle.

But the problem is, that convenience comes with a cost. Instead of killing ourselves in cars rushing home to get to the media we want to see, we're killing ourselves in cars by reading the media we want to read while we're supposed to be driving. Once we start staring at those glowing blue rectangles — no matter how big or small they are — some of us get sucked in. We lose track of time, and we can spend all day there, grazing instead of producing. We can lose our whole day, if we're not careful, to a passive over-consumption of manufactured information.

That's why I wrote The Information Diet, and it's why you should consider making your media consumption a bit more appointment based. It helps you maintain a healthier relationship with information. By scheduling an appointment with your media, for instance, you never lose a day to your Facebook news stream or your RSS reader.

I make appointments first with email. I check email 4 times a day, for 15-20 minutes a day. This is a practice we've heard over and over again. It helps you remain focused and not a slave to the evil notifications headed your way. But don't stop at just email.

If you're a heavy Facebook user, schedule time for it, too. That way, you'll never find yourself on Facebook when you're not supposed to be. You can't get "lost" on Facebook if you've made an appointment for it, and that appointment ends. If you're finding yourself spending too much time playing Words with Friends, then make an appointment with it instead. That way your relationship with it is both proactive and constrained.

And consider appointments with your television media too. Just because you can watch all 160 episodes of How I Met Your Mother in a row on Netflix doesn't mean that you should. Even though prime-time television can now be watched anytime, doesn't mean that it shouldn't come without some constraints. Allot yourself some time, and schedule it in.

Another thing you might consider is scheduling in your production time too. In my book, I recommend that you write 500 words before 8am to shift your mindset from being a consumer into being a producer. Consider also scheduling your producer time. Writing might be your thing, or you could make videos or write songs. Doesn't matter — just produce something when you wake up in the morning so that you spend your day being a producer. Separate your producer time and consumer time and be deliberate about both.

And the trick to making sure you do it and stick to it? Don't put it on your to-do list. Put it on your calendar. Make an appointment for it. And treat it like it's as important as knowing how things would end up between Dr. Fleishman and Maggie was to my mom.

Make More Time by Scheduling Your Media | The Information Diet

Want to see your work here? Send an email to submissions@lifehacker.com!

Some tools have been making it easier for me to write lately, and I thought I'd share them with you. Over the course of the last three weeks, I've found them indispensable. They're all free, and all worthwhile.

FlyCut

Flycut is a dead simple clipboard utility that puts what you copy to the clipboard into a stack. This way, you don't have to go back and find where that link was when you copied it, you can just get to it through the keyboard. I've used a bunch of highfalutin' keyboard managers in the past, but this is the one that has stuck with me the longest. To access your clipboard history, you just press shift when you want to paste, and you can flash through your entire history. It's free.

MOU

MOW is a markdown editor for the Mac. Markdown is a text syntax that lets you get straight to writing, rather than worrying too much about formatting. The Information Diet was written originally in Markdown, and this blog is written in Markdown. MOU is a very simple editor that lets you see how your markdown will look as you type it in real time. What's useful is that it also allows you to assign a stylesheet to the editor preview. So as I'm writing this blog post, it looks exactly how it will look on InformationDiet.com.

BetterTouchTool

Better Touch Tool allows you to take full advantage of the multitouch trackpad on your mac. I set up two gestures that have made my life a lot easier. For me, it does for the trackpad what Divvy does for the keyboard. A three finger swipe to the left makes my current window maximize to half the screen on the left, and a three finger swipe to the right puts another window on the right. So if I want to write something, and have a browser window open to reference it, I never have to worry about resizing a window.

DashExpander

DashExpander is a text expander — you type in an abbreviation, and it expands the text to what you want. I never type in http://www.informationdiet.com, for instance, when I'm typing. I just type in "id.c". This is useful for other things too, like always having links that you want to constantly share on-hand, like links to my Amazon page (which is "booklink"). It also sync with Dropbox which is very useful.

Other free tools I use that I can't live without these days (and that I've mentioned before): Dropbox and Alfred. Of course there's also the recommended tools for a good Information Diet — but those are more focused on the consumption side than the production side.

Now if there was only a free copy-editor...

Free Mac Tools That Make Writing Easier | The Information Diet

Want to see your work here? Send an email to submissions@lifehacker.com!

What's the first thing you do when you get to your computer in the morning? Check your favorite Intertainment? Our pal Clay Johnson discusses why this is the last thing you should do.

I was forwarded this comment Reddit, which is so very close to my advice in the book:

I make sure to start every day as a producer, not a consumer.

When you get up, you may start with a good routine like showering and eating, but as soon as you find yourself with some free time you probably get that urge to check Reddit, open that game you were playing, see what you're missing on Facebook, etc.

Put all of this off until "later". Start your first free moments of the day with thoughts of what you really want to do; those long-term things you're working on, or even the basic stuff you need to do today, like cooking, getting ready for exercise, etc.

The production of information is critical to a healthy information diet. It's the thing that makes it so that your information consumption has purpose. I cannot think of more important advice to give anyone: start your day with a producer mindset, not a consumer mindset. If you begin your day checking the news, checking your email, and checking your notifications, you've launched yourself into a day of grazing a mindless consumption.

Starting your day as a producer means that your information consumption has meaning: the rest of the day means consuming information that is relevant to what it is that you're producing. Waking up as a producer frames the rest of your habits. You're not mindlessly grazing on everyone's facebook's statuses. You're out getting what it is you need to get in order to produce. Waking up as a producer is procrastination insurance.

But there's something else that being a producer does: it gives you more clarity about what it is that you think. Having gone through a gauntlet of about 50 press interviews now for The Information Diet — after talking about it and writing about it so much, I'd actually write a much better book. It's because that production has helped me discover even more nuance to my own thought. It makes sense: who knows more about the way government works: the consumer of information about it, the watchers of MSNBC and Fox — or the producers, the people in the trenches: lobbyists, activists, and campaign staffers. Who knows more about football: the armchair quarterbacks or the players?

The thing that all the blog posts on the sidebar of InformationDiet.com have in common? They were all written before 10am. The best parts of my book were written before 10am. The days where my word count reached into the 3,000s? They were the days that I started writing right when I got out of bed, and then had breakfast. Not the other way around.

Some tactical advice: wake up and start producing. Before you grab breakfast, before you head to the gym, before you head to your email, write 500 words about something. Doesn't matter what. Just sit down, focus and write for that first hour that you're up. It'll change the rest of your day.

500 Words before 8am | The Information Diet

Want to see your work here? Send an email to submissions@lifehacker.com!

What's your maximum NPH? How many notifications are you exposed to every hour? Let's take a second to think critically about these constant requests for your attention: What do they mean? Who is making them? Why are they there? Before I wrote the Information Diet, I audited myself and found I was receiving upwards of 10 notifications per hour: one every six minutes.

First, let's define notification. In the context of our discussion, a notification is something that comes from a service that the service deems worthy of your attention: The scarlet box at the top of every Google page notifying you of things happening in Google+. The messages you get from Twitter telling you that you have a new message. The email icon that shows up in your system tray telling you that you have a new email. Facebook letting you know what you're missing out on Facebook. Your sister's latest move in Words with Friends.

Why do we have them? Why, suddenly, are our phones a symphonic cacophony of distraction, constantly beckoning for our attention? Is it because there's that much important stuff going on in my life?

Of course not. We're getting so many notifications because the companies that now power the web are engaged in a war with one another to capture our attention. They call it "user engagement" and everybody wants it, so everybody's coming up with as many new ways as possible to capture our attention so that at its base, we can view more advertisements. These notifications are not meaningful requests for your immediate attention, they're things designed to get you to lose half your day to the service that created them. That's evil.

For me, the evilest thing that Google has ever done is put that red box on the search-results page. Every Google search now says to me: "we know you're in the middle of searching for something, but we think that you might instead like to immediately know that somebody that you don't know has followed you on Google+, so we've made a bright red box — the most eye catching and animated thing on the page, just so you know." Google's not doing this because Google+ has actual, relevant information that requires my immediate attention. If they were interested in that, they'd give me actual control over what goes into that red box, or give me the ability to shut it off entirely. No — they're doing this because they want me to use Google+ more, so that they can say that they boosted "user engagement on Google+" on their next earnings call.

Besides being disrespectful to your attention, notifications like this do something else that's much more nefarious: they train you to be a passive consumer of information rather than an active one. If we don't control the notifications we're receiving, we're forced to react to them: from Google's big red box, to Living Social's notification for a deal on backwaxing. Left at the default, we create an economy of sensational notifications, with the brightest minds of our generation trying to figure out how to get us to click on the next command for our attention. Can you imagine what would happen if they were instead focused on providing us content worthy of it?

Do yourself a favor: kill the notifications off. Don't participate in the notification economy. Change your relationship from passive to active. Instead of relying on Facebook to command your attention, schedule a meeting with it. If Facebook's important to you, put 15 minutes on your calendar for it and make that the time that you check Facebook. Kill everything you can with a number by it. Eliminate anything you can that makes a noise that might tempt you into giving your attention away. Here are some tools to help.

The only non-renewable resource you truly have is your time. Next time you're asked to "pay" attention to something, remember that's what you're doing: you're paying. Thank you for yours.

This post is about the economics of our attention. For more on how this is actually a large-scale social issue, watch this video

Notifications Are Evil | The Information Diet

Want to see your work here? Send an email to submissions@lifehacker.com!